Theater preview: Playhouse musical 'Wakes'

Tough gig, sleeping for 900 years. Almost as daunting as then crawling out of bed. (And don’t even think about hitting that 50-year snooze button.)

Such is the scenario faced by the heroine of “Sleeping Beauty Wakes,” the fable-based musical that hits La Jolla Playhouse this week.

The show, a co-production with the McCarter Theatre Center of New Jersey, has Beauty — that layabout of fairy-tale fame — heading to a modern-day sleep-disorders clinic, where her father hopes doctors can do something about the poor girl's epic slumber.

It works. (See the play’s title.) But now Beauty has to deal with 21st-century technology and the clinic’s population of jealous insomniacs (who bear such character names as Restless Leg Syndrome and Apnea). Plus: musical numbers!

The latter come courtesy of Brendan Milburn and Valerie Vigoda, husband-and-wife songwriters and musicians who make up two-thirds of the pop act Groovelily.

San Diegans have seen these two before: in 2003 with the similarly fable-minded holiday show “Striking 12” (based on “The Little Match Girl”) at the Old Globe Theatre, and with the romantic musical “Long Story Short” at San Diego Rep in 2009.

FIVE QUESTIONS FOR ASPEN VINCENT

She has faced off against Meat Loaf as the rock singer’s touring duet partner, and done shows from “Dirty Dancing” to “Grease” to Broadway’s “American Idiot” (with her husband, Tony, as a castmate). But Aspen Vincent, the onetime San Diegan who has the title role in “Sleeping Beauty Wakes,” says there’s nothing quite like helping create a new musical — in terms of both exhaustion and exhilaration.

As she readies for a dream role (in more ways than one) at La Jolla Playhouse, Vincent fields a few questions related to her currently fabled existence:

Q: Do you have any recurring dreams?

Yes, there are two recurring dreams I’ve had my whole life. One is that I suddenly find myself under water. And I panic that I can’t get up to the surface. And then I realize I can breathe (underwater). I’m a mermaid!

Q: What about a favorite fairy tale?

Oh, I’ve always been a Belle lover — “Beauty and the Beast.” Maybe because she’s a brunette, and most of them were blondes. I’ll never forget that first scene they did in the ballroom (in the Disney film version), where they made the animation look like a camera was circling the top of the room. That just blew my mind. I just loved that movie. (Vincent later sang the title song in voice-over for one of Disney’s “Princesses on Ice” shows.)

Gee, I was gonna say, is Ambien on the table? (Laughs.) I never believed in sleeping pills, really, until I started touring the world and changing time zones. After that I started to believe in the pharmaceutical supplement business. But hey, if somebody wants to read me a bedtime story, I’m not going to turn that down!

Q: Has “Sleeping Beauty Wakes” done much for your sleep habits?

We didn’t really sleep very well (during rehearsals). We started to think the sleep theme of the show was starting to permeate our personal lives. Everyone was coming in sharing stories of their insomnia and sleepwalking.

Q: What’s your favorite play or movie about dreaming or sleep? (Besides this one?)

I don’t know if I have a favorite movie about sleep per se, but my all-time favorite movie is “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” and it has very similar themes to our show. It’s really about the fear of feeling pain in a relationship, choosing to remain unaware and, in a way, “asleep” because it’s easier than facing the difficult issues in your life.

Every character in “Sleeping Beauty Wakes” goes through a transformation where they discover how to live their lives truly “awake.” How to have the courage to be fully present and open to love and fulfillment. That’s the real message of our show, and it’s something I’ve struggled to learn personally, so maybe that’s why I have such a heart for both this show and this movie!

For “Beauty,” they team with book writer Rachel Sheinkin, their “Striking 12” partner who went on to Tony Award glory with “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee.” Rebecca Taichman directs, with Doug Varone as choreographer.

And stepping in as Beauty herself: the San Diego-bred Aspen Vincent, a graduate of Santa Fe Christian School who came up through Christian Youth Theatre in North County and made her first professional splash with Starlight Musical Theatre in Balboa Park.

This is not the first bow for “Beauty,” by the way. Director Jeff Calhoun (of the Playhouse’s Broadway-bound “Bonnie & Clyde” and the Globe’s “Emma”) staged the project’s world premiere for Deaf West Theatre in L.A. in 2007, with American Sign Language as a major component.

Milburn says now that while he loved Calhoun’s vision, “Doing a brand-new musical in two languages at once was like pulling teeth while performing brain surgery on yourself.” (That would require a different kind of clinic entirely.)

Now, after its own four-year slumber, “Beauty” is back. And the Playhouse hopes it opens some eyes.

“Sleeping Beauty Wakes” composer Brendan Milburn enjoys working with 140 characters. Not in his stage shows so much (that would keep anyone awake), but in the endless online dramedy that is Twitter.

Here, a “Twitterview” we conducted with Milburn recently about the new musical, its initial production at New Jersey’s McCarter Theatre Center, and his partnership with Valerie Vigoda, Milburn’s wife and the show’s lyricist. (Note: Some elements have been edited for space and clarity.)

@jimhebert: First q: Should I type “spoiler alert” before even mentioning the title? Or is it OK to give away that Beauty does, indeed, wake?

@brendanmilburn: Oh, I think it’s fair to say that if the title is #sleepingbeautywakes, then you can probably expect that #sleepingbeautywakes.

Q: Did u learn a lot about #SleepingBeautyWakes from the @McCarter staging?

A: Boy, did we. This is the first time I’ve done a production with a serious amount of projections and video integrated.

It’s thrilling to have the projections be a part of the stage picture, but it’s easy to overdo it. In fact, you could say that about pretty much the entire process: we all overdid R creative contributions & then pared back, piece by piece, ’til we got 2 the truth.

Q: That sounds fun. But do you also have singing spindles? I think spindles are musical-theater gold.

A: HAH! No sir, the spindles do not sing. But there are things called “sleep spindles” that occur in readouts of Stage 2 sleep …

And they make an appearance in the Sleep Clinic Doctor’s analysis of the unconscious girl’s sleep waves.

FAIRY TALES ONSTAGE

Fairy tales, particularly those handed down by the likes of the Brothers Grimm, frequently are written in the key of “Eeeeee!” And yet they’ve proved to be a charm for musical theater over the years. A look at some of the top fable-based shows:

• “Into the Woods”: Composer Stephen Sondheim and writer James Lapine’s grown-up riff on a host of fairy-tale characters became a Tony-winning hit after premiering at San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre in 1986, and still sees regular revivals. (Locally, Valley Center Community Theatre just opened a production.)

• “The Little Mermaid”: This Disneyfied version of the Hans Christian Andersen tale hit Broadway in 2008, running for a year and a half.

• “Beauty and the Beast”: A huge commercial hit, the Disney production (based on a story with murky 18th-century origins) had a 13-year Broadway tenure beginning in 1994, and still tours.

• “Striking 12”: The pop band GrooveLily — two of whose members, the husband-and-wife team Valerie Vigoda and Brendan Milburn, wrote the score to “Sleeping Beauty Wakes” — created this adaptation of Andersen’s “The Little Match Girl.” It hit the Globe in 2003.

• “Wicked”: The “Wizard of Oz” saga is not quite a fairy tale, but the success of this musical has been like one. The show, adapted from an Oz “prequel” by novelist Gregory Maguire, has been a top draw on Broadway for nearly eight years. The touring version makes its third visit to San Diego next June.

A: Striking 12, and #sleepingbeautywakes, for that matter, both sprang from the mind of our collaborator Rachel Sheinkin.

Rachel heard a song of Valerie Vigoda’s called “Little Light”, and it reminded her of The Little Match Girl story …

After the success of that show, we were approached by Deaf West to write another musical inspired by a fairy tale.

Val and I wanted to do Rumpelstiltskin, and called it “RUMP! The Musical!” And Rachel vetoed that.

Rachel’s response to “RUMP!” was to counter with “how about Sleeping Beauty, but set in a sleep disorder clinic?” And we were off.

Q: Ah, boo Rachel! “RUMP! The Musical!” — a show that must be seen.

A: Perhaps we’ll do “RUMP!” next, if my collars are not afraid of being typecast as “those fairy-tale people.”

Q: Do you think there’s kind of a cultural sleep fascination these days (Maybe because no one gets enuf?)

A: Absolutely. Americans don’t get enough sleep, generally. Every fall when the clocks are set back 1 hour, there are fewer car crashes … because everyone’s slept in one hour. On the Monday in spring when we all get one less hour, the car accidents pile up.

Q: I’m guessing that, ironically, creating a new musical about sleep is not very sleep-inducing.

A: We did not sleep well for six weeks during rehearsals, tech, and previews for #sleepingbeautywakes

Working in theater, I think, is antithetical to calming down at the end of the day and winding down to bed.

Always lying in bed at 2 in the morning, going over what was working and what wasn’t, knowing our kid would be waking us at 6 a.m.

Last night was no exception, ’cause we have to turn in our rewrites Friday. See the circles under my eyes.

Q: Just to clarify, are u part of the musical ensemble this time, or did u step away from performance altogether?

A: This time Val and I are not on stage — we are in the back of the house watching and taking notes.

It’s far easier to be objective about your writing when you’re not busy performing what you’ve written. :)

Q: OK, last q: Is this show FDA-approved? (Can’t wait for the side-effects disclaimer before curtain.)

A: We skim the surface of the science of sleep; we bend a few facts about sleep disorders for the sake of the characters and the story.

But I think we get at the heart of the matter: finding a way to live truly awake in the world.